Position Title: Solutions Architect
Job Location: New Rochelle, New York
Employment Status: Full Time
Work Schedule: Normal business hours (Monday-Friday)
Salary: $165K base
Position Purpose
The Software Engineering Solutions Architect leverages enterprise architecture techniques, software engineering principles, expertise, and team management experience to design solutions using systems and software. The Software Engineering department builds software to meet the challenges facing literacy learners and teachers. Our software enables and supports a wide range of next-generation learning experiences with the promise of doing even more with the right technology team members. The Software Engineering Solutions Architect defines technical systems and software solutions for customer-facing and backend systems implemented by internal BEC teams or development partner teams using a variety of technologies.
Job Responsibilities
Strategy
- Ensures the logical and systematic conversion of business, customer, and product requirements into flexible technical solutions which support current and future needs.
- Performs functional analysis, timeline analysis, tradeoff, capacity modeling, and interface definition studies to formalize customer requirements into solution architecture specifications.
Architecture
- Able to successfully manage interactions with many constituents including senior business and IT leaders, end business users, application development teams, and operational teams to clarify requirements.
- Responsible for defining high-level solution architecture and breaking them down to detailed designs which support all requirements and can be implemented by development teams and managed by operational teams.
- Defines in written documents non-functional requirements (availability, interoperability, portability, manageability, scalability, maintainability, security, monitoring, SLAs, KPIs, regulatory and legal compliance) based on business vision, best practices, and company architectural direction.
- Balances a variety of competing goals in a design, including project time, scope and budget constraints, system performance, message verbosity, and loose coupling.
- Assists with writing and communicating best practices, standards, and guidelines documents that support Technology teams.
- Evaluate, define, and when necessary prototype alternative solutions to determine the most appropriate approach.
Research & Best Practices
- Keeps up on industry trends and current technological standards and best practices. Assists with assessment of industry standards for information models and their applicability.
- Drives adoption of identified design patterns, standards, techniques, principles, products, methodologies, and best practices throughout the software engineering organization.
Project Leadership
- Serves as a technical advisor on IT projects. Ensures that IT projects adhere to the principles, guidelines, and standards established by the company.
- Accountable for guiding and modeling the technical implementation of shared artifacts, deployment models, and applications in their entirety—from interfaces, business logic, data, security, and network, and infrastructure.
- Maintains ongoing communication with project teams, verifying that what was designed was built and adjusting solution architecture as appropriate throughout the project.
- Ensures short-term project goals align to the company architecture plans to maintain balance with long-term strategy.
- Conceptualizes and articulates alternatives to problem resolution.
- Builds consensus across stakeholder groups including management and individual contributors.
Job Requirements/Skills and Experience
Education, Experience and Knowledge
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, 8 or more years of related experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
- Experience in the development of high volume, mission-critical applications in heterogeneous environments/architectures for multi-user solutions.
- Experience developing solutions that satisfy security, scalability, high availability, and network management/monitoring requirements.
- Experience with relational and/or non-relational (NoSQL) databases and the design of highly available, distributed database applications.
- Experience with Service Oriented Architecture concepts, web/RESTful services, and event-driven architecture.
- Experience in all aspects of the software development lifecycle: design, functional and technical requirements, coding, debugging, testing, release, and operational support.
- Knowledge of Agile/Scrum development methodologies.
Skills
- Excellent oral, written, presentation, and listening communication skills.
- Excellent interpersonal, persuasion, and diplomatic skills.
- Excellent reasoning, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
- Strong skills in a broad set of development technologies: Java, PHP, Web Services, RESTful Services, JavaScript, HTML, scripting languages, etc.
Abilities
- Ability to develop technical specifications, designs, and architecture artifacts.
- Ability to take ownership of an assignment through to completion and work effectively with people from different departments, companies, and customer organizations.
- Ability to solve complex problems with multiple complex abstract variables.
- Ability to communicate technical information in an appropriate manner for widely varied audiences (from senior management to individual contributors on software development teams).
Leadership
- Courage to push difficult or unpopular perspectives.
- Ability to explain complex technical issues in a way non-technical people understand.
- Self-starter who solves complex technology and operational problems/issues with little to no guidance from senior management. Seeks senior management advice and guidance as needed for critical decisions with broad business exposure and high risk.
- Business/Application Knowledge – demonstrates deep knowledge/expertise in multiple and inter-dependent applications and processes.
- Conduct tradeoff analysis (ability to consider alternative architectural approaches and present pros, cons, and recommendations).
- Remains unbiased toward any specific vendor or technology choice; is more interested in results than personal preferences.
Desired
- Technical, development, or architectural leadership.
- Experience in Solutions engineering techniques such as architecture modeling, alternative analysis, tradeoff analysis, and portfolio analysis.
- Experience in business process modeling & reengineering.
- Experience in various architecture disciplines like Application, Data, Security, and Infrastructure.
- Experience in specifying system performance requirements, network utilization targets, system resource budgets, and creating flexible APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
- Broad understanding of a spectrum of infrastructure technologies including network, hardware, and operating systems.
- Advanced knowledge of enterprise application integration patterns.
- Knowledge of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and/or cloud technologies such as Amazon Web Services or Azure.
- Knowledge of relevant security, regulatory, and compliance matters as they relate to system design, e.g., FERPA, COPPA, ESAPI/OWASP, SAML.
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